Facebook Chief Security Officer Joe Sullivan said at the Hack in the Box HITBSecConf2013 conference in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, that the social network was already in the process of implementing stronger security controls before news broke of the National Security Agency's Prism online surveillance initiative in June, IDG News Service reported.

Facebook Chief Security Officer Joe Sullivan said at the Hack in the Box HITBSecConf2013 conference in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, that the social network was already in the process of implementing stronger security controls before news broke of the National Security Agency’s Prism online surveillance initiative in June, IDG News Service reported.

Sullivan said, as reported by IDG News Service, that Facebook enabled Transport Security Layer encryption as its default in July, so data such as chat contact lists are now encrypted, adding that the social network will move to 2,048-bit RSA encryption from 1,024-bit, and it plans to implement another encryption feature, Perfect Forward Secrecy.

He added, as reported by IDG News Service:

(The disclosures by former NSA Contractor Edward Snowden) maybe made it a little bit easier to have that conversation publicly and show the effort that has been going on behind-the-scenes all along.

(Facebook has in place) very robust practices around scrutinizing every single law enforcement request so that when we had an opportunity to be transparent, we could feel good about that.

As is apparent from the statistics, a decent percentage of requests that we get are not legally sufficient.

Readers: Are you satisfied with Facebook’s efforts to reassure its users that their data are safe?